Miss Manners.

Portrayal of college lacks the naked truth

January 14, 2004|By Judith Martin.

If a Wellesley graduate of a certain age worries about attracting retrospective ridicule, her mind races to ... posture pictures. Uh-oh. These were photographs once taken of all students, ostensibly for health reasons connected with posture. As was revealed decades later, the photographs had been ordered in cooperation with a dubious sociological study done independently of the school, which purported to connect body types with intelligence. These so-called posture pictures were not unique to Wellesley, nor to female colleges; Ivy League colleges, then all-male institutions, also mandated them.

The "uh-oh" is that the female photographs were taken nearly nude, and the male ones entirely so. Whatever effect this had on the posture, knowing that revealing photographs of oneself are out there somewhere beyond one's control ought to teach humility.

If people now want to laugh at the 1950s in general, as it seems they often do, and at Wellesley College in particular, Miss Manners would have thought this provided ample material.

But no. The new film with this thesis, "Mona Lisa Smile," passes up mentioning posture pictures for something more shocking: a scene purporting to show Wellesley students taking a course in, of all things, etiquette.

But Wellesley did not teach etiquette. Miss Manners was there at the time, and you had better believe that she would have noticed. Even Posture and Relaxation, which served as a cover for the posture pictures, was only a mini-course in the Physical Education department.

For one thing, the practice of etiquette is not an academic subject (nor, by Wellesley's standards, was journalism, another field into which Miss Manners later fell headfirst). The history and theory of manners are academic subjects, but even now few academics understand this element of philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology and literature.

For another thing, it would have been superfluous, as all the students, not just prissy Miss Manners, knew basic etiquette. This was not because they attended an expensive school, but because etiquette was something all children had to suffer through at home.

Innocent of the history of etiquette, the film is rife with anachronisms. Students were given the dignity of being addressed by title and surname, and faculty eschewed the title of "doctor," since their doctorates were taken for granted. "Poise" was a word associated with beauty contests, which were disdained; the term "gracious living" was said as a joke.

More deeply, the film fails to question the assumption that female students were at Wellesley to pursue marriage, when accomplishing this required an exactly equal number of males with the same goal. Whether they first establish their families and then build their careers, as then, or reverse the order, as now, does not strike Miss Manners as much of a change.

What does shock her is the realization that posing naked is hardly worth mentioning these days, but knowing how to behave is considered damning.

Dear Miss Manners--My boss' son is having a baby-- well, his girlfriend. And he would like to know, what is the "norm" when a baby is born out of wedlock and the parents want to hyphenate the baby's last name?

Gentle reader--Norm? There is no normal standard about names in this society. It's total chaos, and it's driving Miss Manners crazy. Nobody knows what to call anybody else.

But much as she would like a standardized system, she would hardly countenance one that had a specific way of identifying those born out of wedlock. Just tell your boss to be grateful that society no longer decrees what such children should be called.